Worth reading. "We introduce and discuss the Personal Knowledge Network (PKN) model as an alternative model to KM and PKM that is better adapted to the demands of the new knowledge environments. The PKN model views knowledge as a personal network and represents a knowledge ecological approach to KM." The new approach, which I support, is to understand knowledge as a network, rather than knowledge as a process.

Graham Attwell summarizes the debate around MOOCs taking place in academic right now. "I don’t agree with Nellie Deutsch’s assertion that the attitude the elite universities are choosing to take is 'if you can’t join them, break them'," he writes. "Instead I think they are trying to take what is clearly a successful and ground breaking innovation and trying to mold it to fit their own pedagogic and business models." True.

Open courses are exactly the opposite of what traditional education managers want to run, which is why innovation will come from outside the system, according to this article. "Change in current traditions of higher education for many institutions will most likely require disruptive innovations outside of the academy first and we can see the evidence of the first seeds of that through the open course movement."

I just want to save this item on magement of the future for something I'm writing. "We are moving to a new economy that does not value any work that can be automated & outsourced. Taylorism is dead. Stephen Gill describes how we have to focus on work that cannot be done by robots." If you want to destroy the creativity and innovation in an organization, management strictly from abovbe using clearly defined objectives and processes. If you want to stimulate innovation and creativity, enable autonomy, encourage diversity, foster interactiuvity and practice openness.

Scott Wilson points to what might be a starting trend, the movement to publishing web applications without a server backend. Once downloaded, these apps would run in your browser without needing any support from the internet at all. They would generally be authored using HTML, CSS and Javascript. There are many reasons why you would want to do this - users are sure of their privacy, they can modify their own apps, they can run on any platform. But as Johannes Ernst says, writing decentralized software is ten times harder than writing a server-based application. You need to actually ship software, people will run it on varied systems, people will run old versions, and it's harder to monetized - you can't run advertisements on it, you can't collect statistics from it. And yet - and yet - it's what we wantif we want a stable decentralized web infrastructure. Some examples of web apps are Butterfly, Monster Math, Oblique Strategies, and Write That Thesis.

I have in the past warned people against using FeedBurner to distribute their RSS feeds, and all the more so after it was acquired by Google. Now that Google is engaged in a quest to eliminate RSS, the future of FeedBurner is in question. And now people's FeedBurner feeds have started going dead for no reason. And on July 26 Google announced then that the Twitter account @FeedBurner was being closed, as was the FeedBurner Blog. Personally I think they're pushing people to post feeds to Google+, which has no RSS in or out - it's a closed environment. If you're willing to pay for analytics, then you should switch to something like FeedBlitz right now. But more importantly, no matter what you do, you should host your RSS feed on your own URL so you can switch providers without losing all your readers.

As Timothy Vollmer reports, "A few days ago the Students for Free Culture (SFC) published a provocative blog post called “Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0.” The article urged Creative Commons to deprecate (meaning 'retire' or similar), or otherwise change the way Creative Commons offers licenses containing the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives terms, because they 'do not actually contribute to a shared commons.'" This Creative Commons post responds to that demand, saying, essentially, that they'll think about it. As I have stated before, licenses that allow vendors to charge people for access to resources are not more free, they are (clearly and obviously) less free. And I think the constant push to eliminate or otherwise depreciate 'non-commercial' licensing is a longstanding lobby from the content publishing industry in an effort to depreciate Creative Commons itself. And again, if Create Commons listens to its users they will find people using the non-commercial twice as often, as they do at Flickr. And that's why the publishers are going after Creative Commons itself - because after years of trying, they can't convince people that selling their work is the best way of distributing it for free.

I have recommended engaging students to create open educational resources as part of the learning process; these nine students "in an Advanced Technology for Teachers course at Georgia College have published their own e-textbook, Using Technology in Education, through Apple's iBookstore." Good stuff. The texbook is available for free here (I wish they had published it some place other than iTunes).

I have talked off and on recently about grading students according to their network weight. It's not a big leap to say something like "grade them by their Klout score?" But this is manifestly not what I meant - I would want to assess people according to the good they contribute to the network, not the attention they can earn from it - and certainly not in a clumsy manner such as Klout. But it was inevitable someone would make a Klout score part of an overall grade. Before reacting in panic, take note that this is a marketing class. Todd Bacile, an FSU "marketing instructor has been the subject of a lot of discussion – and outrage – since he shared his practiceof grading students based on their Klout score," accoridng to Inside Higher Ed. The Chronicle also jumped on this story. According to the story, "Though some critics contend that Klout is a useless metricbecause it can be manipulated, Fountain said those in his class who tried to beat the system were ultimately disappointed." If that were true, nobody would have passed the course. Kloutcan be manipulated, obviously, otherwise the class has no point - but not by simple "happy birthday" messages.

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